A demonstration of using a SparkFun 6DOF IMU to control models in a scene. The fish on the left uses just the pitch and roll as determined by the accelerometers. The fish on the right uses primarily the gyros and lets the accelerometers correct against bias drift.

The rendering is done in Ogre. The fish are example models that come with the engine.

The InertiaCube suffers from the same thing every other IMU I’ve come across does: It’s expensive. $1800 to $3400 depending on which version you get. The SparkFun that I’m using is relatively inexpensive at $450, but the price I pay is that it’s much less polished and doesn’t come with any software.

The sad part of all this is that once there is a mainstream application for these sensors the price is going to drop like a rock. They are expensive because the only people buying them are researchers. (Maybe I should get a grant too.

You’re right these sensors are pretty pricey. If you have written this mainstream application that’ll drop the prices – let me know! For normal user-pc-interaction I always found these devices funny, but not really useful…